My Fair Lady (1964) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error A misogynistic and snobbish phonetics professor agrees to a wager that he can take a flower girl and make her presentable in high society. Director: Alan Jay Lerner (book), George Bernard Shaw (from a play by) (as Bernard Shaw) | 1 more credit » Stars: a list of 44 titles created 10 Dec 2011 a list of 35 titles created 21 Dec 2011 a list of 40 titles created 25 Apr 2012 a list of 30 titles created 03 Feb 2013 a list of 24 titles created 5 months ago Title: My Fair Lady (1964) 7.9/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Won 8 Oscars.

Another 15 wins & 13 nominations. See more awards » Videos A woman leaves an Austrian convent to become a governess to the children of a Naval officer widower. Director: Robert Wise Young Oliver Twist runs away from an orphanage and meets a group of boys trained to be pickpockets by an elderly mentor. Director: Carol Reed A magical nanny helps bring the two children she's in charge of closer to their father through songs and magical adventures. Director: Robert Stevenson A Victorian Englishman bets that with the new steamships and railways he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days. Directors: Michael Anderson, John Farrow Stars: David Niven, Cantinflas, Finlay Currie Edit Storyline Pompous phonetics professor Henry Higgins is so sure of his abilities that he takes it upon himself to transform a Cockney working-class girl into someone who can pass for a cultured member of high society. His subject turns out to be the lovely Eliza Doolittle, who agrees to speech lessons to improve her job prospects. Higgins and Eliza clash, then form an unlikely bond -- one that is threatened by an aristocratic suitor. Written by Jwelch5742 The loverliest motion picture of them all!

See more » Genres: 25 December 1964 (USA) See more » Also Known As: Mi bella dama See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know? Trivia Of the main cast only Stanley Holloway actually sang. The others were either dubbed or just talked their way through the songs. See more » Goofs In the Royal Ascot scene, the horses race in the wrong direction. Ascot is a right-handed track where the horses race clockwise and the grandstand is on the outside of the track. The camera is facing the crowd, so the horses should race from left to right, but they're shown racing the other way. See more » Quotes [first lines] [sounds from crowd, occasionally a word or phrase, indistinct and mostly not associated with a character] Mrs. Eynsford-Hill : Don't just stand there, Freddy, go and find a cab. Freddy Eynsford-Hill : All right, I'll get it, I'll get it.

See more » Crazy Credits In the posters, playbills and the original cast album for the stage version of "My Fair Lady", the credits always read "based on Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion' ", letting the audience know what play "My Fair Lady" was actually adapted from. The movie credits simply read "from a play by Bernard Shaw". See more » Connections I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face (1956) (uncredited) A musical with a brain as well as a heart 28 August 2003 | by eliza-doolittle (Cambridge) – See all my reviews There's a lot of negative things been said about Audrey Hepburn's interpretation of the role of Eliza. Perhaps she's not ideal in the earliest scenes of the movie - her "dirtiness" is never quite believable - but it has to be said that despite this smallish drawback she still glows, and makes an amazing Eliza overall.

The reason for this is simple; Audrey Hepburn brings her "own spark of divine fire", (to quote Higgins) to the role and her vulnerability, mixed with her sweet, naive charm and even her wonderfully juvenile pettishness shown in "Just You Wait" all prove what a talented actress she really is. For an example of this, just watch Eliza's facial expression at Ascot, when she realises her opportunity to demonstrate her new-found mastery of the English tongue - sweetly hilarious. MFL has been criticized as being too romanticized, too overblown. I disagree; musicals are suposed to be lavish affairs, and none pull it off quite so well as "My Fair Lady" does. It's a momentous film but it has its subtle points: watch the way in which Eliza's eyes are centred on Higgins when she enters at the ball, and the way in which the two of them stare at each other for a few seconds at the top of the stairs a few moments later. It musn't be overlooked that, thanks to its being based on a Bernard Shaw play, "My Fair Lady" has what the great majority of musicals lack: a deeper meaning and something really quite profound to say.

The actor in the role of Colonel Pickering is a little weak, but it must be said that Rex Harrison IS Henry Higgins. In a lot of ways (in fact, in most ways) Higgins has an objectionable personality: rude, snobbish, impatient and even misogynistic, but somehow Rex Harrison pulls it all off and makes us like Higgins without betraying the character. As to romance, his song "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" is an ode to the kind of love which sneaks up on you. Overall, this movie is romantic, but not too sentimental. It has just enough romance to be dramatically fulfilling, but it never becomes soppy or mawkish. The word "love" is never mentioned at all and the two leads never even kiss. The famous end sequence is perfect and does the movie justice; after all, a big happy bow tied around a perfect romance at the end would simply not fit with everything we have learned about the two protagonists. 91 of 152 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes My Fair Lady Movie 1964: Why It's Much Less Sexist Than You Think Archive Photos / Getty Images Audrey Hepburn in a scene from the film 'My Fair Lady' Think it's a sexist relic? Think again I know what you’re going to say about Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins. A snobby British guy in a Sherlock suit tries to “improve” a working woman by teaching her to talk pretty and look bangin’ in necklaces?! Screw you, Henry Higgins! Lean in to the flower business, Eliza! There’s nothing “loverly” about misogynistic woman-shaping narratives! Put My Fair Lady in a folder with all the other movies that “send bad messages,” like Grease and Gone With the Wind! Screw Henry Higgins, indeed, but please do not underestimate My Fair Lady, a movie that, on Tuesday, celebrates the 50th anniversary of its premiere. And although it may be easy to dismiss the 1964 movie musical as an outdated rom-com from the shady period before feminism got rolling, it’s much more than just a relic of a sexist time. The movie itself isn’t misogynistic– it’s about misogyny.

First, a little history: The 1964 Audrey Hepburn movie version of My Fair Lady is based on the Broadway musical (starring Julie Andrews) with songs written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. The musical was based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play, Pygmalion, which was itself based on the part in Ovid’s Metamorphosis when a sculptor named Pygmalion falls in love with his statue of the perfect woman. That part of Metamorphosis was based on every guy who ever thought he could create the girl of his dreams (specifically, Freddie Prinze Jr. in She’s All That, of which Ovid was reportedly a mega-fan). Even studio execs are always trying to cultivate the perfect girl, and that led to a bit of behind-the-scenes drama when it came to casting Eliza Doolittle. Julie Andrews had played Eliza on Broadway, and had already mastered the character and the vocals, and her stage co-star Rex Harrison was going to play Higgins in the movie. But studio head Jack Warner didn’t think Julie Andrews had the name recognition or glamor to carry a major motion picture.

“With all her charm and ability, Julie Andrews was just a Broadway name known primarily to those who saw the play,” Jack Warner wrote in his 1965 autobiography My First Hundred Years in Hollywood. “I knew Audrey Hepburn had never made a financial flop.” But Andrews got the last word — losing the My Fair Lady role allowed her to make Mary Poppins, for which she won a Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Actress. Audrey herself was still pretty good, even if she had to have her songs dubbed by another singer. As TIME wrote after the movie came out in 1964: The burning question mark of this sumptuous adaptation is Audrey Hepburn’s casting as Eliza, the role that Julie Andrews had clearly been born to play….after a slow start, when the practiced proficiency of her cockney dialect suggests that Actress Hepburn is really only slumming, she warms her way into a graceful, glamorous performance, the best of her career. From Ancient Greece to Edwardian England to 1960s Hollywood, the narrative remains the same: an overbearing male “genius” who transforms a pliable (read: vulnerable) woman from her meager, inadequate self into his personal ideal of womanhood.

But thanks to Lerner and Loewe’s songs, My Fair Lady critiques that narrative as much as it upholds it. Their musical is not about a genius attempting to transform a weak woman. It’s about a strong woman attempting to retain her identity in spite of the controlling machinations of a small-minded man. Take, for example, the undisguised misogyny in nearly all of Henry Higgins’s songs (spoken, with droll irony, by Rex Harrison). This is from a song near the end, fittingly titled “ A Hymn to Him ,” in which Higgins asks “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”: Why is thinking something women never do? Why is logic never even tried? Straightening up their hair is all they ever do / Why don’t they straighten up the mess that’s inside? This comes shortly after he says women’s “heads are full of cotton, hay and rags” calls men a “marvelous sex.” That’s not the only song where he drones on about how amazing he is compared to women: in “You Did It,” he takes complete credit for everything Eliza does, and in “I’m an Ordinary Man,” he idealizes his woman-free “bachelor” life.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Lerner and Loewe were themselves misogynistic jerks, and these songs were meant as appreciative bro-anthems. Maybe if they had been alive today, the music videos would have featured naked models on leashes. But more likely, they wrote these songs to humiliate Henry Higgins, to show the audience that he’s a jerk and they know it. And Eliza Doolittle has plenty of songs that demonstrate she is anything but a statue; after all, the entire musical is written largely from her perspective. By far the best is “ Without You, ” which is pretty much the Edwardian-showtune version of Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable:” Without your pulling it, the tide comes in Without your twirling it, the Earth can spin Without your pushing them, the clouds roll by, If they can do without you, ducky, so can I. There’s also “Show Me” (where she tells her loser boyfriend Freddy that actions speak louder than words) and “Just You Wait” (where she fantasizes about leaving Henry Higgins for him to drown in the ocean while she goes to meet the King).

Lerner and Loewe could easily have made Eliza into a love-sick ingenue, just by writing a few more songs like “I Could Have Danced All Night” (where she’s crushing on Higgins because they danced for a hot second, remember it’s 1912.) But they didn’t. Of course, the whole Eliza-is-a-strong-woman argument gets compromised by the ending. Because after all her proclamations that she can “stand on her own,” Eliza comes back to Higgins. And when he asks “where the devil are my slippers?” she brings them to him. It’s an ending with the same ashy taste as the ending of Grease, because it seems incongruous: Eliza has no business being with Higgins, and it’s clear she’s independent-minded enough to know it. Except, it’s 1912. And Eliza has no family connections, no money and no formal education, which means she has nowhere to go but back to the streets (or away with the insipid and financially dubious Freddy). She isn’t brainwashed or stupid — when given the choice between an emotionally abusive man and destitution, she chose the man.

Choosing the man doesn’t make My Fair Lady a sexist movie; it makes it a movie about a sexist time. Of course, 50 years later, there’s another version of My Fair Lady: Selfie, on ABC, is the newest to take up the Pygmalion mantel, when a male marketing exec “rebrands” a girl who has fouled up her social media presence. Let’s see how they do it without Lerner and Loewe. Read TIME’s 1964 review of My Fair Lady, here in the archives: Still the Fairest of Them All Sign up for My Fair Lady, dir. by George Cukor, 1964 | The Core Curriculum My Fair Lady, dir. by George Cukor, 1964 Relates to: Metamorphoses My Fair Lady, dir. by George Cukor, 1964. George Cukor's 1964 film My Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn, was adapted from the 1956 Broadway musical by Lerner and Loewe. My Fair Lady is a musical adaptation of the play Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw (1912).

Both the play and the later musical spin the myth of Pygmalion, substituting an English phonetics professor (Henry Higgins) for the artist Pygmalion. His modern "Galatea" is instead a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle. Higgins makes a bet that he can transform Eliza into a proper lady and pass her off as a duchess in high society, by teaching her how to speak "correctly." True to the story of Pygmalion, he eventually falls in love with Eliza, however, the story also takes on issues of class and women's independence. This clip is from the later part of the film, after Higgins' triumph: his self-congratulatory attitude and celebration drive Eliza away, as she becomes aware of Higgins' objectification of her. Julie Andrews originally played the part of Eliza in the Broadway musical, however, when the film was made, the studio feared she was not a big enough name to draw crowds, and the decision was made to cast Audrey Hepburn instead (who does not sing, but lip syncs).

Rex Harrison, a Leading Man With Urbane Wit, Dies at 82 Rex Harrison, a Leading Man With Urbane Wit, Dies at 82 By ERIC PACE Rex Harrison, the suave British actor who won a Tony in 1957 and an Academy Award in 1964 for his portrayals of Prof. Henry Higgins in ''My Fair Lady,'' died of pancreatic cancer yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82 years old. The actor, who was knighted in July 1989, played a wide variety of roles during his long career in theater and films, but he was best known for his portrayal of the waspish professor of phonetics in the musical based on George Bernard Shaw's play ''Pygmalion.'' Sir Rex made his last stage appearance on May 11 in a revival of ''The Circle,'' a comedy by Somerset Maugham. The production, in which he co-starred with Glynis Johns and Stewart Granger, opened Nov. 20, 1989 at the Ambassador Theater. ''He wanted to be on the stage - that was it,'' said Sir Rex's attorney, Harold Schiff.

''He didn't care about retiring.'' ''He died with his boots on, no question about it,'' said Elliot Martin, producer of ''The Circle.'' A popular actor who loved his craft, Mr. Harrison was known for his wit and charm. He was tall and elegant and was often cast as a man of wealth and refinement. In ''The Circle'' he played a British lord whose scandalous past comes back to haunt him. Serious but unpretentious about his work, the actor once said: ''There's always a struggle, a striving for something bigger than yourself in all forms of art. And even if you don't achieve greatness - even if you fail, which we all must - everything you do in your work is somehow connected with your attitude toward life, your deepest secret feelings.'' Mr. Harrison gained international fame with his award-winning stage and film portrayals of the sharp-tongued professor in the Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe musical. His co-stars as the cockney flower girl Eliza were Julie Andrews on Broadway and Audrey Hepburn in the movie.

He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1963 for his other favorite film role, Julius Caesar in ''Cleopatra,'' in which Elizabeth Taylor played the title role. He appeared in more than 40 films, and many stage productions over the decades, in the United States and the United Kingdom, including his portrayal of Henry VIII in ''Anne of the Thousand Days'' (1948), for which he won his first Tony, and ''The Love of Four Colonels'' (1953), which he also directed. Despite all his theatrical experience, Mr. Harrison, a musical duffer, had to work hard on his performance in the first stage production of ''My Fair Lady.'' ''Originally I had a block about appearing in a musical,'' he recalled years later. ''I went to a voice teacher for a while, but that did no good. My range is about one and a half notes. I ended up talking the musical numbers, which was revolutionary at the time.'' ''The lyrics are extremely intricate,'' he added. ''They move along like a precisely acted scene.

If you miss a word - heaven help you - the orchestra rattles past like an express train, and you've got to run like the devil to catch up.'' 'Just a New Haven Hit!' After successful warm-up performances out of town, there were still moments of panic during the Broadway opening, on March 15, 1956, at the Mark Hellinger Theater. Mr. Lerner recalled later in his autobiography, ''On the Street Where I Live,'' that the New York audience was disappointingly hushed during the first scene, which had generated much laughter out of town. Aghast, the director, Moss Hart, rushed up to co-workers in the rear of the theater, crying: ''I knew it! It's just a New Haven hit! That's all! Just a New Haven hit!'' Mr. Hart erred. In The New York Times the next morning, Brooks Atkinson wrote: ''Bulletins from the road have not been misleading. 'My Fair Lady' is a wonderful show. As Professor Higgins and Eliza, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews play the leading parts with the light, dry touch of top-flight Shavian acting.'' ''Although Mr. Harrison is no singer,'' Mr.

Atkinson said, ''you will probably imagine that he is singing when he throws himself into the anguished lyrics of 'A Hymn to Him' in the last act.'' ''By that time, he has made Professor Higgins' temperament so full of frenzy that something like music does come out of him,'' he went on. Mr. Harrison recalled in his autobiography, ''Rex,'' which came out in 1974: ''My contract for 'My Fair Lady' was for nine months only - but how could you leave a show like that? It was all far too exciting, and I stayed with it for two years.'' He went on to act for another year in a ''Fair Lady'' production at the Drury Lane Theater in London, where he and the show also had an enormous success. 'By George, They've Got It!' Film critics also applauded the movie ''My Fair Lady'' and Mr. Harrison's performance in it.

Bosley Crowther wrote in The Times: ''As Henry Higgins might have whooped, 'By George, they've got it!' They've made a superlative film from the musical stage show - a film that enchantingly conveys the rich endowment of the famous stage production in a fresh and flowing cinematic form.'' Mr. Harrison won further praise from Mr. Crowther for his performance in the film ''Cleopatra.'' ''Caesar is no fustian tyrant,'' the critic wrote, ''Played stunningly by Rex Harrison, he is a statesman of manifest wisdom, shrewdness and magnanimity. And he is also a fascinating study in political ambiguities. Mr. Harrison's faceted performance is the best in the film.'' Rex Carey Harrison was born March 5, 1908, in Huyton, England, a granite-quarrying town six miles east of Liverpool. His parents were William Reginald Harrison, a cotton broker, and Edith Carey Harrison. Stagestruck from boyhood, he went to work backstage for the Liverpool Repertory at the age of 16.

His first part was one line; he moved on to other acting parts, then toured for nine years in road companies of successful plays before he made his mark, initially on the London stage, where he appeared for the first time in 1930 and for the last time in 1988, in ''The Admirable Crichton.'' In 1981, Artistic Control Mr. Harrison never attended drama school, but had no regrets on that score. ''The important thing is to learn through experience,'' he said in an interview for The Times before ''The Circle'' opened in 1989. ''The more you do the more you learn. I don't think anyone can teach acting from a podium.'' Mr. Harrison later returned to the role of Professor Higgins, to repeated standing ovations, in a 1981 Broadway revival of ''My Fair Lady,'' in which he was given total artistic control. Lauding Mr.

Harrison's re-creation of the part, Frank Rich's review in The New York Times said: ''Yes, he's 25 years older - so are we all, God help us - but he still looks natty in his cardigans, his velvety smoking jacket, his ballroom finery. And he is investing the role of Henry Higgins with a generosity of spirit and mellifluous humor that only years and experience can bring.'' Mr. Harrison was married in 1934 to Marjorie Noel Collette Thomas, with whom he had a son, Noel; to the actress Lilli Palmer in 1943, with whom he also had a son, Carey; to the actress Kay Kendall in 1957; to the actress Rachel Roberts in 1962, and to Elizabeth Rees Harris in the early 1970's. All the marriages ended in divorce except the one to Miss Kendall, who died in 1959. Sir Rex is survived by his sixth wife, Mercia Tinker, whom he married in 1978, and by his two sons.

The funeral will be private, but there will be a public memorial service at 11 A.M. June 18 at the Little Church Around the Corner in Manhattan. Don't You Pause, 'Enry 'Iggins? Some of Mr. Harrison's better-known stage appearances were in the following plays: Anne of the Thousand Days, 1948 The Cocktail Party, 1950 Book and Candle, 1950 The Love of Four Colonels, 1953 My Fair Lady, 1956 The Fighting Cock, 1959 Caesar and Cleopatra, 1977 The Kingfisher, 1978 Heartbreak House, 1984 The Circle, 1989 His more than 40 films include: Major Barbara, 1941 Blithe Spirit, 1945 Anna and the King of Siam, 1946 The Ghost and Mrs.

Muir, 1947 Unfaithfully Yours, 1948 The Four Poster, 1952 Midnight Lace, 1960 Cleopatra, 1963 The Yellow Rolls-Royce, 1964 My Fair Lady, 1964 Doctor Doolittle, 1967 My Fair Lady Christopher Cazenove plays Henry Higgins, 'a scary part,' in 'My Fair Lady' - Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, FL) - 30 November 2007 The 'My Fair Lady' perfectionist 'just an ordinary man'? Hardly, says actor Christopher Cazenove Elizabeth Maupin, Orlando Sentinel WEST PALM BEACH - When the cast members showed up for their first rehearsal of the touring production of My Fair Lady, each of them was given an assignment. One was to research prostitution in the early 1900s. One was to look into the hierarchy of servants in wealthy British households.

One was to find out all he could about what Americans call "garbage collectors" and Brits call "dustmen." The goal, said actor Christopher Cazenove, was to give everyone "a real grounding in the characters they play." In the process, though, the actors got a little object lesson in the difference between My Fair Lady's elegant toffs and the lower classes -- the servants who serve their tea-cakes and the impoverished Cockneys who sell their flowers in the streets. Whom did Cazenove have to research? Nobody, he admits. He plays Henry Higgins. He's the lead. This production of My Fair Lady, which comes to Orlando Tuesday after an acclaimed two-year run in London and a 12-city United Kingdom tour, is all about those differences in class. "It shows the dark side of London, of Covent Garden, the poverty," said Cazenove. "Everything is very much based on character." Famed producer Cameron Mackintosh (Cats, Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera) originated this production at London's Royal National Theatre in 2001, with Trevor Nunn as director and Matthew Bourne as choreographer. Nunn, best known in the U.S.

for his direction of Les Mis and Cats, had given a new take to his revival of Oklahoma!, and he spoke to Mackintosh about his double enthusiasms for directing George Bernard Shaw -- whose Pygmalion was the source of My Fair Lady -- and for musical theater. Designer Anthony Ward also had worked on Oklahoma!, and Bourne (Swan Lake, Edward Scissorhands) had choreographed a rethought revival of Oliver! The result, with Miss Saigon star Jonathan Pryce playing the misanthropic linguist Henry Higgins, charmed just about everybody around. In the Times of London, veteran critic Benedict Nightingale said "the National's My Fair Lady isn't just luvverly -- it's luvverlier than anyone dared hope." Even Guardian critic Michael Billington, who gave the production one of its only mixed reviews, called it "shamelessly enjoyable." 'The greatest part' Cazenove, who made his name playing well-off British heels on the U.K. miniseries The Duchess of Duke Street and ABC's Dynasty, went out to audition to replace Pryce when the opportunity came up. But he was on crutches, having broken his leg, and the role went to another actor.

"I thought, 'Oh, that's it, I'll never do it,' " Cazenove said earlier this month before his opening performance in West Palm Beach. But when the U.K. tour came up, Cazenove got the nod, and he repeats his turn as Higgins for the 40-week U.S. tour. "It's the greatest part. I've never been an actor who thought 'I have to play that part' -- except for Higgins. The only other one is Lear, and maybe not that." Cazenove, 61, faced the behemoth that everyone faces who takes on the role -- the memory of Rex Harrison, who played Higgins in the original production, in 1956, and again in the 1964 film. "You start by being very influenced by that actor. He was wonderful in the role. I listened to many people in the recordings, but no one came close to him." In his first West End show, 1970's The Lionel Touch, Cazenove worked with Harrison, a notoriously difficult man who was known to "do some dreadful things to people." But the great actor was nothing but pleasant to him, Cazenove said.

"He had the most incredible charm when he wanted to do it. It was quite the experience." A character transformed In rehearsals, cast members began by reading Pygmalion aloud, and then Cazenove set about discovering his character. "He is absolutely ghastly, and yet you have to end up liking him. Yet it's important not to soften that beastliness either." In the end, it's only Higgins' final song, "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," Cazenove said, that makes him out to be anything but a "great big baby" and "a spoiled child." And the actor still faces the challenges of playing the perfectionist professor eight times a week. "It's a scary role to play. It's so wordy." When he was in rehearsals, Mackintosh caught him stumbling over a line and called him out on it. Higgins absolutely cannot stumble, the producer said. "He has to be absolutely articulate. That's what he does." My Fair Lady Movie Review & Film Summary (1994) | Roger Ebert Tweet "My Fair Lady" is the best and most unlikely of musicals, during which I cannot decide if I am happier when the characters are talking or when they are singing.

The songs are literate and beloved; some romantic, some comic, some nonsense, some surprisingly philosophical, every single one wonderful. The dialogue by Alan Jay Lerner wisely retains a great deal of "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw, himself inspired by Ovid's Metamorphosis. Advertisement This fusion functions at such an elevation of sophistication and wit that when poor smitten Freddy sings "On the Street Where You Live," a song that would distinguish any other musical, this one drops Freddy entirely rather than risk another such simplistic outburst. His sincerity seems childlike compared with the emotional fencing match between the guarded Higgins and the wary Eliza. It is characteristic that in a musical that has love as its buried theme, no one ever kisses, or seems about to. The story involves a meeting of two egos, one belonging to the linguist Henry Higgins, the other, no less titanic, to the flower girl Eliza Doolittle. It is often mistakenly said that they collaborate because Higgins ( Rex Harrison ) decides to improve Eliza's Cockney accent.

In fact it is Eliza ( Audrey Hepburn ) who takes the initiative, presenting herself at Henry's bachelor quarters to sign up for lessons: "I know what lessons cost as well as you do, and I'm ready to pay." Even in this early scene, it is Eliza's will that drives the plot; Higgins might have tinkered forever with his phonetic alphabet and his recording devices if Eliza hadn't insisted on action. She took seriously his boast the night before, in Covent Garden: "You see this creature with her curbstone English? The English that will keep her in the gutter till the end of her days? Well, sir, in six months, I could pass her off as a duchess at an Embassy Ball. I could even get her a job as a lady's maid or a shop assistant, which requires better English." The final twist, typical Shavian paradox, is what Eliza hears, and it supplies her inspiration: "I want to be a lady in a flower shop instead of sellin' at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.

But they won't take me unless I can talk more genteel." Advertisement It is her ambition, not Henry's, that sets the plot in motion, including the professor's bet with his fellow linguist Pickering, who says he'll pay for the lessons if Higgins can transform her speech. Higgins' response will thrum below the action for most of the play: "You know, it's almost irresistible. She's so deliciously low. So horribly dirty." If Henry will teach Eliza to improve her speech, she will try to teach him decency and awaken his better nature. It is unnecessary to summarize the plot or list the songs; if you are not familiar with both, you are culturally illiterate, although in six months I could pass you off as a critic at Cannes, or even a clerk in a good video store, which requires better taste. It is difficult to discuss George Cukor's 1964 film as it actually exists because, even now, an impenetrable thicket of legend and gossip obscures its greatness. Many viewers would rather discuss the film that wasn't made, the one that would have starred Julie Andrews , who made the role of Eliza her own on the stage.

Casting Audrey Hepburn was seen as a snub of Andrews, and so it was; producer and studio head Jack L. Warner chose Hepburn for her greater box-office appeal, and was prepared to offer the role to Elizabeth Taylor if Hepburn turned it down. Advertisement One of the best-known items in the history of movie trivia is that Hepburn did not sing her own songs, but was dubbed by the gifted Marni Nixon. So notorious became this dubbing, so egregious was it made to appear, that although "My Fair Lady" was nominated for 12 Oscars and won eight (including best picture, actor, director and cinematography), Hepburn was not even nominated for best actress; Julie Andrews was, the same year, for "Mary Poppins," and she won. At this remove, can we step back and take a fresh look at the controversy? True, Hepburn did not sing her own songs (although she performed some of the intros and outros), and there was endless comment on moments when the lip-syncing was not perfect. But the dubbing of singing voices was commonplace at the time, and Nixon herself also dubbed Deborah Kerr ("The King and I") and Natalie Wood (" West Side Story ").

Even actors who did their own singing were lip-syncing to their own pre-recorded dubs (and an occasional uncredited assist). I learn from Robert Harris , who restored "My Fair Lady" in 1993, that this was apparently the first musical to use any form of live recording of the music, although "only of Mr. Harrison, who refused to mouth to playbacks. His early model wireless microphone can be seen as a rather inflated tie during his musical numbers." Harrison's lips are therefore always in perfect sync, as opposed to everyone else in this film and all previous musicals. That Hepburn did not do her own singing obscures her triumph, which is that she did her own acting. "My Fair Lady," with its dialogue drawn from Shaw, was trickier and more challenging than most other stage musicals; the dialogue not only incorporated Shavian theory, wit and ideology, but required Eliza to master a transition from Cockney to the Queen's English. All of this Hepburn does flawlessly and with heedless confidence, in a performance that contains great passion. Consider the scenes where she finally explodes at Higgins' misogynist disregard, returns to the streets of Covent Garden, and finds she fits in nowhere.

"I sold flowers," she tells Henry late in their crisis. "I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me, I'm not fit to sell anything else." Advertisement It is typical of Shaw, admirable of Lerner and Loewe, and remarkable of Hollywood, that the film stays true to the original material, and Higgins doesn't cave in during a soppy rewritten "happy ending." Astonished that the ungrateful Eliza has stalked out of his home, Higgins asks in a song, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" He tracks her to her mother's house, where the aristocratic Mrs. Higgins ( Gladys Cooper ) orders him to behave himself. "What?" he asks his mother. "Do you mean to say that I'm to put on my Sunday manners for this thing that I created out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden?" Yes, she does. Higgins realizes he loves Eliza, but even in the play's famous last line he perseveres as a defiant bachelor: "Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?" It remains an open question for me, at the final curtain, whether Eliza stays to listen to what he says next.

Apart from the wonders of its words and music, "My Fair Lady" is a visual triumph. Cukor made use above all of Cecil Beaton, a photographer and costume designer, who had been production designer on only one previous film ("Gigi," 1958). He and cinematographer Harry Stradling , who both won Oscars, bring the film a combination of sumptuousness and detail, from the stylization of the famous Ascot scene to the countless intriguing devices in Higgins' book-lined study. The supporting performances include Wilfred Hyde-White as the decent Pickering, speaking up for Eliza; and Stanley Holloway as her father, Alfred P. Doolittle, according to Higgins "the most original moral philosopher in England." Doolittle was originally to have been played in the movie by Jimmy Cagney; he might have been good, but might have been a distraction, and Holloway with his ravaged demeanor is perfect. Advertisement What distinguishes "My Fair Lady" above all is that it actually says something. It says it in a film of pointed words, unforgettable music and glorious images, but it says it.

Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" was a socialist attack on the British class system, and on the truth (as true when the film was made as when Shaw wrote his play) that an Englishman's destiny was largely determined by his accent. It allowed others to place him, and to keep him in his place. Eliza's escape from the "lower classes," engineered by Higgins, is a revolutionary act, dramatizing how "superiority" was inherited, not earned. It is a lesson that resonates for all societies, and the genius of "My Fair Lady" is that it is both a great entertainment and a great polemic. It is still not sufficiently appreciated what influence it had on the creation of feminism and class-consciousness in the years bridging 1914 when "Pygmalion" premiered, 1956 when the musical premiered, and 1964 when the film premiered. It was actually about something. As Eliza assures the serenely superior Henry Higgins, who stood for a class, a time and an attitude: They can still rule with land without you. Windsor Castle will stand without you. And without much ado we can all muddle through without you.

Advertisement Broadway Musical Home - My Fair Lady Broadway Musical Home Who starred in the original cast? Where can I buy the music? What’s the buzz on Broadway? Find out at Broadway Musical Home My Fair Lady Buy Tickets About the Musical This Lerner and Loewe 1957 Tony Award-winner for Best Musical is based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play “Pygmalion” and is the basis for the 1964 Academy Award-winning film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. Story: Eliza Doolittle, a rough Cockney girl, meets Colonel Pickering and Henry Higgins in Covent Garden where she’s selling flowers. When Higgins remarks that he could help Eliza speak properly and raise her status in the community, Pickering challenges him to do so and Eliza takes him up on the offer. Though difficult and frustrating for both Eliza and Higgins at first, the lessons soon begin to work wonders, and produce results that neither predict.

Question: Who played Henry Higgins in the 1964 film 'My Fair Lady'?
Answer: REX HARRISON